This morning I watched CNN’s live broadcast of President Obama’s speech on education reform and his defense of “Race to the Top.” I don’t have time right at the moment to explain all of the reasons that I was disappointed in the speech and this administration’s position on education reform, but I will say that it is extremely disturbing to know that RTT is basically NCLB in “new clothes.”
Here is the talk that CNN should have aired. This is the speech that Obama should have given. This is the talk that all education leaders should hear.
Chris Lehmann is the founding Principal of Science Leadership Academy and author of the Practical Theory blog. He is also an incredibly impressive young education leader and someone that I am proud to call a colleague and a friend. Oh how I wish that this talk had been the one we had all viewed this morning on CNN.
Did you listen to President Obama’s speech this morning? What did you think?
Recently the Houston Chronicle Education blog, SchoolZone, posted some interesting data related to students who have graduated from high schools in the Houston Independent School District.
The “sound bite” is: Only 15% of HISD freshmen graduate college…
However, if you read the blog post, you will see that this statistic is based on a specific group of students and is based on a very specific definition of college graduation.
Specifically — it refers to graduating from college with 4 years.
My problem with this statistic and sound bite? This statistic doesn’t reflect the reality that many successful college graduates are not traditional in the sense that many do not graduate within 4 years. The reasons for this are varied: working part-time or full-time to pay for tuition/living expenses, changing majors or working on double majors, starting college a little later than the first semester following high school graduation (due to family situations, military service, etc.)
This one is personal for me…
I started college right after high school and would, for the most part, have been considered a typical and successful college student. I was accepted into a major state university that had a selective admissions policy and made relatively good grades in all of my classes (except math!) For full disclosure, let me state that I did not graduate from an HISD high school (I am originally from Louisiana), and I graduated from high school in 1989 which does mean that I started college in a different time/climate than the students included in this statistic.
BUT — I graduated from college in 5 1/2 years. Why? Because I 1) transferred to a different university during my sophomore year (for financial/family reasons) and 2) changed my major once and then added a second concentration (resulting in a total of over 160 undergraduate hours — two concentrations in visual art). I did go to school full-time, but I did also work at least part-time beginning in my sophomore year and through graduation. I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Visual Art & Design with concentrations in graphic design, painting, and drawing — far more credit hours and content knowledge/skill than most college graduates. I then went on to grad school and in the end I now have:
1 bachelor’s degree in art & design
1 masters’s degree in studio art
30 graduate hours in art education (equivalent to bachelor’s in art ed credit hours)
1 master’s degree in education leadership
The overall total comes out to 13 1/2 years or 27 semesters of college. I spent more time in college than I did in K-12…
But because I didn’t graduate from undergrad within 4 years I would not be counted in the 15% and my post-secondary education would not be considered within the “norm” or as indicative of the quality of the instructional program of my high school (or school district).
Go figure.
My point? Many students are not counted in the 15% (for many reasons) and because of those many reasons, this statistic SHOULD NOT be used to reflect on the quality of an academic program.
Or maybe it means that all of my accomplishments are meaningless because I did not achieve the first “milestone” of graduating from my undergraduate program within 4 years…
So, like many other Facebook users, I am REALLY annoyed with their recent privacy changes. As an educator who promotes the use of social networking as a valid and very useful learning tool/experience, it makes me angry for Facebook to behave in a way that undermines my efforts to promote a more connected learning environment.
I found the recent NY Times article, How to Opt-Out of Facebook’s Instant Personalization, very helpful. I am also recommending that ALL Facebook users go to the “Account” tab (upper right corner of screen) and click on every setting option to make sure that all of the settings match the user’s personal privacy preferences and needs. While you are in your account settings area of Facebook, you should also click on the option to view what your FB profile looks like to most FB users. This will help you see if your profile settings are set appropriately based on your own needs.
Another important thing to check is how your profile looks to people who are NOT Facebook users. You will need to use a new web browser to do this — one that you have not used recently to log-in to your Facebook profile. For example, I hardly ever use Safari on my Mac. If I pull up my profile page in Safari I am not logged in to Facebook and this allows me to be able to preview what others see if they try to access my FB profile if they are not logged in. Thanks to my personal privacy settings, when someone tries to access my profile URL, they see a message that the page does not exist.
I know we can’t expect complete privacy in our now very connected world. However, Facebook’s recent changes — changes that require everyone to opt-out rather than just opt-in — is very bad behavior based entirely on $$$. Sadly, most users — especially users who are not super tech-savvy — will not automatically know to check these settings.
I love Facebook. I enjoy reconnecting with old friends, classmates, and with my large, extended family on Facebook. I enjoy connecting with my PLN through Facebook. I just don’t necessarily want all of those connections to visible, accessible, or exploited outside of Facebook.
I have my personal settings configured so that what happens in/on my Facebook stays within Facebook (for the most part) — but I also am careful about what I post within Facebook anyway because I know that at any given time Facebook may change settings that allow some of my information to “leak” out to other parts of the web. Unfortunately, Facebook is NOT Vegas…
From the article (I have highlighted the numbers in bold):
At Frost Elementary on Houston’s south side, third- and fourth-graders gathered in the school’s library to watch Obama’s address on TV. No parents opted out their children, according to Principal Christian Winn….
Not all school principals, superintendents or parents in the Houston area were as enthusiastic about Obama’s speech. Several school districts decided not to show the speech live. Galena Park, for example, recorded the speech and teachers can opt to show it later in the week. The district has received opt-out notices from parents of 59 of about 21,300 students, said spokesman Craig Eichhorn…
In the Klein school district, which encouraged teachers to show the speech if it fit into their lessons, most parents seemed to let their children watch. At Klein Forest High School, for example, about two dozen of the 3,400 students were excused…
Westside High School in the Houston Independent School District appeared to draw one of the largest protests from parents. About 300 students, or 10 percent of the study body, were opted out of watching the speech…
While I do understand that some districts decided not to air the speech (or at least not air it live), for those that did air the speech the “opt-out” numbers seem very low to me considering all of the noise that was made prior to the speech being aired.
I don’t see data on how many phone calls the districts received and whether or not the number of phone calls was comparable to the numbers above, but I do find the low numbers very interesting.
What about your school or district? What was your attendance like yesterday? How many students on your campus were opted-out of viewing the speech by their parents?
I’ve been wanting to write this post for the past three days, but I have been constantly “counting to ten”, hoping to calm down enough to be able to write a coherent post that doesn’t devolve into an angry rant.
I am still not calm enough to write a short essay, so I am just posting my thoughts here in bullets. Perhaps later I can expand on some of these thoughts in a longer post.
First, let me be very clear and say that I think it is absolutely ridiculous that people are protesting the President’s upcoming address to school children and that some schools and districts have actually caved in to the pressure to censor the President’s speech.
Here are the rest of my thoughts on this issue:
This is NOT unprecedented. It has now been widely reported that previous presidents have made similar addresses to school children in the past. There is nothing wrong with the leader of our country — the President of the United States — making a speech to school children about the importance of staying in school, setting goals, studying hard, and working to succeed.
If you are offended by the suggested curriculum activities then let me explain the difference between “suggested” and “mandated” to you. A suggestion can be ignored, but a mandate must be followed. I am an educator and most of the educators I know would probably have either not used the SUGGESTED activities or would have only used the ones that applied to their current curriculum. All educators I know, on the other hand, are forced to comply with the UNFUNDED MANDATE of No Child Left Behind — and this HAS hurt our education system far more than a 15 minute speech possibly could.
If you are so afraid of a socialist agenda then please, remove your child from the tax-payer-funded public schools and please do not apply for Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid at any time in your life. All of those are essentially socialist institutions.
If the President is making a speech regarding the importance of staying in school and studying hard, then what message are students receiving when they are barred from watching the speech because their parents complained or — even worse — because their parents kept them home from school for the day. Nice.
The President, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, does serve as an excellent role model for MANY at-risk minority youth in our country. I see way too many of these students failing, dropping out of school, and joining gangs. It is well known in the education community that too many of these youth end up serving jail time rather than completing school and becoming productive members of society. If the President can have ANY influence over these students then I support his efforts fully. I prefer full classrooms and schools rather than full prisons and correctional facilities.
What will our children think when they look back on this moment and see how their parents and their educators reacted to this event? How will they view us?
Why is it okay for so many people to speak so poorly and so disrespectfully of our President now? When Bush was in office and anyone argued with his policies and his actions they were automatically labeled as traitors and terrorist sympathizers. It was NOT okay then to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now it’s perfectly okay to speak out — and to speak dishonestly — about efforts to reform the health care industry and education. This attitude by a certain segment of our population disgusts and saddens me greatly.
Parents are with their children much longer than teachers and MUCH longer than a 15 minute speech by the President. Why would anyone who has confidence in their own parenting skills and their own guidance of their children be afraid to let their child listen to such a short speech? It baffles me.
Please spare me the “interrupted instructional time” argument. I’ve spent the past ten years working in our public schools and that argument doesn’t work for me. Let’s get rid of during-school-time pep rallies, motivational assemblies, and test-prep pep rallies first before we can use the “interrupted instructional time” argument.
I am much more concerned about some of the text books being used in our schools than I am about what the President might say in 15 minutes. Too many of our textbooks are full of inaccuracies or are outdated (science, social studies) — and don’t even get me started on the personal agendas that make their way into textbooks by state-level adoption committees (see recent issue with Texas and Social Studies curriculum).
I’m done. For now. I am sure I have left something out, but I can always come back and update this post.
I am sure that some of you will agree with what I have written and that some of you will disagree with what I have written. If you have more to add to what I have said above, please share your thoughts in the comments.
UPDATE: I want to be sure and link to others who have also posted some eloquent thoughts on this issue. Please visit the following links to read more:
As a Gen X educator, I am very saddened by John Hughes’ untimely death. My friends and I really connected to the teen characters in his movies — everyone could find at least one character that they could identify with whether it was the jock, the nerd, the weirdo/outcast, the preppie, or “all of the above”.
As an educator, I think the movie that stands out the most to me now is The Breakfast Club. It was always one of my favorites of Hughes’ movies, but as an educator it is a reminder to me that all students are different, all students have different backgrounds, and all come to school with different “baggage” — and sometimes that baggage is exactly what we don’t expect.
All of our students are different and we need to be accepting of those differences. We need to make “room” for those differences in our classrooms, in our curriculum & instruction, in our school structures, and in our extracurricular activities, clubs, and organizations.
I will end by quoting the “letter” that Brian (Anthony Michael Hall) reads at the end of the movie:
Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us…In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…an athlete…a basket case…a princess…and a criminal…Does that answer your question?
Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Hughes. Thank you for your creativity — your movies entertained us, affirmed us, and educated us.
UPDATE: One more reason for establishing more online learning: kids with illnesses
Ever since I read Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns I’ve been thinking about how unprepared our education system is for the technology innovations that can allow us to reinvent schooling from the ground up. Our education system as a whole is locked into a very specific model that depends upon and feeds into other established systems (businesses and cultural systems).
Over the past several months we have also been dealing with an economic situation that has even threatened some school district budgets leading some districts to cut staff. And still, for the most part, we remain steadfastly married to our traditional structures.
One year ago I took steps to begin some part-time online teaching for two reasons: 1) to learn more about the pedagogy of the online classroom and 2) to diversify my skill set and expand my employment options. Fortunately I have a bachelor’s and master’s degree in a subject area outside of education which makes it easy for me to apply for many college-level online adjunct positions in that content area. This has been a very rewarding and productive endeavor.
What I have discovered however, is that colleges and universities — and many private or for-profit K-12 virtual schools — include free training as part of the interview and hiring process, while some of the public (state-run) virtual schools require potential teachers to pay for their own state-approved training program (usually in the neighborhood of $500 per course) before being hired. There is a very strong message in both of those approaches — one says “welcome, come on in and we will prepare you for this” and the other says “sure, you can do this, as long as we don’t have to invest in your development…”
As I watch the current news about the potential Swine Flu pandemic and I read recent blog posts regarding the need for practicing online teaching and learning so that one can shift online if a state of emergency is declared (I love Brit’s suggestion of doing once-per-year weeklong “online drills”) and “laptops as response to emergency”, I can’t help but reflect back on my earlier thoughts about how unprepared our system is for anything outside of the traditional approach to education. We don’t even consider it a priority to train teachers (for free) to be able to teach online. At the very least we could set up state-approved certifications based on an exam rather than one-size-fits-all fee-based training, and allow teachers to just take a certification exam.
There are many good reasons to begin making the shift to more online or blended learning experiences in our classrooms — including emergency situations such as a major flu outbreak, snow & ice storms, or a hurricane — but we are not making the investment in this as we should be. I pray that we don’t see a widespread outbreak of this flu, but if we do then we are extremely unprepared for ensuring that learning continues even if the schools are shut down for health & safety reasons. It may be too late to prepare in this particular situation, but it’s not too late to begin preparing for future emergencies — as well as to just innovate to ensure that we can meet the needs of many students who aren’t well served by our current traditional structures.
HUGE hat tip to Clarence Fisher for finding this video and posting it on his blog. This is exactly what I wrote about and what I envisioned for schools in my book Wikified Schools
I especially like the part in the video where they talk about the “Loop Marketplace” — I can easily see that translating into a “stock market” for instructional strategy ideas or lesson plans across a district.
* Do you sometimes feel stuck? Feel like you have so many more ideas about how you could help your organization or your clients, but that What Clients Want is just some training?
* Should you attempt to get unstuck? How hard should you push your internal or external clients to get them to see the full range of what is possible? Or should you give them what they ask for?
* If you are feeling some level of stuck, what should you do to get unstuck? How important is it to get unstuck? Is it okay to learn a lot about all kinds of different solutions, but to primarily work on simple training solutions?
* If you are stuck, should you be concerned about your future?
As I read the question the first response that came to mind was “I started blogging!” in order to get “unstuck”. I found myself “stuck” when the reform work we were trying to do on our campus came to a halt due to district and campus administrative transitions. I felt that my hands were tied, and blogging provided the creative release that I needed to explore ideas and discuss positive solutions to the many challenges we were/are facing in our urban schools. It didn’t change my immediate environment and it certainly did not impact my colleagues directly, but it helped me feel empowered and gave me the drive that I needed to continue pushing for change in my organization.
The second time I became stuck was AFTER I started blogging. By becoming immersed in the world of blogging I became immersed in Web 2.0 and before long I began to feel very alone in my day-to-day work where no one else was speaking the Web 2.0 language. It was ironic — the “getting unstuck” solution that saved me before — blogging — created the new “stuck” situation where I didn’t feel as if I could move forward with the ideas that I was being exposed to in my online experiences.
My solution to that situation was to write a book. In the course of writing the book I ended up taking a new position that now seems like fate because of the many opportunities it allowed me to share these ideas with interested colleagues. In less than a year my immediate world has changed and the ideas in which I am interested (and that I have written about on my blog and in my book) are being taken very seriously by many people in my organization.
Did these two solutions change the problems in my organization? No. However, they did help me change my perspective and find a place for my ideas — even if that place was outside of my geographic region. While the two “getting unstuck” solutions that I described above are very specific and may not work for everyone, they do share common attributes that other solutions may also provide:
I’ve been thinking about how unprepared our education system is for the technology innovations that can allow us to reinvent schooling from the ground up. Our education system as a whole is locked into a very specific model that depends upon and feeds into other established systems (businesses and cultural systems).
